The Bitter End by Alexa Donne
Published by Random House Books For Young Readers on 15th October 2024
Genres: Young Adult Fiction / Thrillers & Suspense
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
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When a winter storm traps eight teens in a remote ski cabin, they find themselves stranded with a killer—who may be one of their own. From the acclaimed author of The Ivies and Pretty Dead Queens comes a YA thriller that will make your blood run cold.

The trip of a lifetime might be the death of them all.

The students of LA’s elite Warner Prep can’t wait for their Senior Excursion—five days of Instagrammable adventure in one of the world’s most exclusive locations. This is not your average field trip.

Which is why eight students can’t believe their bad luck when they end up on a digital detox in an isolated Colorado ski chalet. Their epic trip is panning out to be an epic bore . . . until their classmates start dropping in a series of disturbing deaths. The message is clear: this trip is no accident.

And when a blizzard strikes, secrets are revealed, betrayals are exposed, and survival is at stake in a race to the bitter end.

Now that autumn has hit the UK and temperatures have dropped (quite suddenly, mind you), I’ve been diving into all sorts of cosy reads to snuggle up with under the blankets. The Bitter End was not one of those reads, and that’s because this book is so chilling and thrilling that I did not have a cosy time AT ALL.

It took me a few chapters to get into The Bitter End because I struggled with being introduced to three point of view characters as well as a large group of friends at once. If you know me or watch my Booktube videos, you’ll know that I am awful with character names, so this is entirely on me. I eventually got it though and by about 20% I was flying through this book and trying to apply my best detective skills to figure out who was killing the characters off – after I finally learnt their names and everything!

My favourite thing about The Bitter End was the setting. As I said above, it was truly chilling, with the group of school…. friends? acquaintances? heading off to an isolated cabin for a wellness retreat that they really didn’t want to go on. I have found that I really enjoy isolated cabin and mountain settings, so I tend to seek out these kinds of books. Alexa Donne did isolated and cold really well, and once night hit in both the book and real life I felt like I was alone with only candlelight to keep me company.

I had a lot of fun trying to figure out who the killer was and what their motive could have been. I enjoyed the outcome a lot, especially because I was starting to get a niggling feeling about someone a few chapters prior and I was laser focused on them after that. It turned out that another character was too! And this meant I was instantly more connected with the other character because they were basically representing me in those moments.

The only downside of this book for me was the lack of emotion with some of the characters, particularly once their “friends” started dying off. These teenagers all coped with it very well, considering there was murder afoot, and I felt like we should have seen more meltdowns or crying from the start, rather than just towards the end of the crisis once everything became too much.

Check out the rest of the tour schedule for The Bitter End over at TBR and Beyond Tours!

About the Author